Daily Archives: May 30, 2009

I want to talk really quickly about Prop 8. But first I have to mention food.

I know I drone on a lot about health and nutrition. I do, there’s no denying it. The reason I’m so passionate, though, is because I know there’s a kind of karma at work here. Body karma, you might call it. In other words, you get out what you put in.

Remember those collapsible toy figures from years ago?

Someone gave me a Popeye once. He had a button underneath. Press the button and Popeye went all limp and droopy. Let go, and he sprang up to full height again. I figured a button was probably cheaper in the long run than giving him spinach. Then again, I was only 10, so I had no fix on reality yet. Still don’t, as a matter of fact.

Anyway, healthy living is like a collapsible Popeye.

Treat your body right, nurture it with yoga, exercise, and meditation, eat foods that contain life – plants (including spinach), fruits, nuts, seeds, seaweed, algae, and so on, and bingo, what it gives you in return is glowing health, lots of stamina, a bright, buoyant mood, and an immune system equipped to handle even the strongest ailments or disease.

Conversely;

put in a lot of dead stuff – meat, chips, fries, cookies, candy;

drink poisons every day, such as alcohol, sodas, and those toxic fruit juices that claim to be good for you, but actually they’re just sugar and food coloring in water; and

endanger your lungs with cigarette smoke

and what you’re heading for in most cases is debilitation, disease, and premature aging. Your body basically just wilts and dies. It has to, you’ve not sustained it in the ways it needs for survival.

I always find it hilarious to watch smokers, especially young ones, sitting around so proudly with cigarettes, sucking in long drafts of carcinogens and expelling them again into the air, imagining as they do so that they look pretty damn cool. When, in fact, the image they’re really presenting to a steadily more conscious world is of a hopeless addict with very low self-respect, and not enough will-power or good sense to quit corroding their insides with toxins.

I mean, do they not watch the news? Every time there’s an apartment fire, how many occupants are carried out on stretchers suffering from smoke inhalation? Smoke in your lungs is lethal if not treated. So why would you subject yourself to it voluntarily? Jeez.

In short, the principle of Body Karma decrees that if you do the right thing you will get the right results and your own personal Popeye won’t collapse.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the California Supreme Court’s decision last week to endorse and uphold the iniquities of Proposition 8 and prevent gay people getting married.

Unlike protestors outside the court and others – my neighbor David Hyde Pierce for one – I’m not angry about the decision. The judges weren’t saying gay people are sinners, outcasts, agents of Beelzebub, and shouldn’t be allowed to get married; they simply decided they couldn’t overturn the majority vote of the California electorate as it stands right now.

Even though Prop 8 was passed mainly due to financial manipulation and scare propaganda put out by those conniving evil bastards at the head of the Mormon Church in Utah (who do believe that gay people are sinners, outcasts, agents of Beelzebub), it nonetheless limped through the system and became law. For now. And until it ceases to be the law, then mere judges are not able to countermand it. That was their point.

It did make me think, though.

Imagine if, a few years ago, when all of this really came to a head, the government had done the right thing and okay’d civil unions for homosexuals. Countrywide, no exceptions, all benefits, all rights. Stopping short of calling it marriage perhaps – that way Christian bigots could sleep easy in their beds, assured that the institution they claim to treasure so much wasn’t in the grip of Satan and his followers after all – but elevating same-sex couples to the same status as every other normal person in America.

If that had happened back then, we’d have had equality in everything but name, and probably been satisfied with that. The whole issue may even have subsided for a while.

But the government didn’t do the right thing, did it? It gave in to the religious bullies who use the power of the pulpit to hypnotize the millions in their thrall, and refused to budge an inch.

Now look what’s happened. Because of a few hardnuts playing politics with people’s lives, a time-bomb has started ticking, one that’s going to go off way sooner and with a much bigger bang than it otherwise would have.

Such is the outcry against this continuing injustice; so utterly demonized has Prop 8 become, along with all those who, to their shame, supported it; and so loud and insistent is the drum-beat for change, that gay marriage is coming at us faster than it ever would. Faster, in actual fact, than some of us are really ready for. (I mean, what will I wear?)

Because of the humiliating spasm of outrageous bigotry that Prop 8 represents, it’s my guess that within a couple of years the very thing the combined small minds of the National Organization for Marriage, Miss California, the Mormons, and all their ghastly sort – the real sinners! – have been campaigning against so lustily for so long, may well happen after all.

Not only that, but to hell with civil unions. Gay folks will probably end up with full rights under the law AND able to call themselves legally “married.” How groovy is that?

It’s karma at work, people.

Feed hate, cruelty, selfishness, fear, and division into the system, and you get massive problems out at the other end. But do what’s right by society, be fair and accepting and kind, and you’re rewarded with justice, harmony, happiness, and calm.

These aren’t my ideas, by the way; some guy I read about called Jesus came up with them first. Unfortunately, he was put to death before his time by a different bunch of religious zealots. They too thought they knew what was best for everyone and believed that the weight of their preaching could keep a good set of ideals down. As a result, he became bigger than their narrow, fearful minds could ever have envisioned.

Sadly, it also means we’ll never know what he thought of gay people getting married. My guess is he’d have been for it. Not only for it, but standing on the picket lines, tongue-kissing guys to make a point, and tossing beer-cans at passing Mormons. Jesus was cool that way.

TV Swami – he waaaay off-track today. But he say YES to good nutrition and loving one another. Not a bad thought for the weekend.